This study investigates issues of reliability and validity in pragmatics research and examines the extent to which role-play data approximate naturally-occurring discourse with respect to the content and frequency of requests in Mexican Spanish. The data were gathered from naturally-occurring conversations and field notes in a wide array of contexts and included requests from males and females in formal and informal situations. The results of the current study indicate that natural data represent the most valid way of observing different aspects of speech-act (verbal and non-verbal) behavior in social interaction, as there are various types of request forms that cannot be generated if one follows the role-play path. However, open role plays, if constructed with sufficient contextual information, may offer some advantages over natural data in that they have the potential of eliciting interactional data for research purposes while controlling for various sociolinguistic variables.

Dual immersion schools in the United States, which combine native Spanish speakers and students learning Spanish as an L2, encourage English development while promoting Spanish learning. However, relatively little is known about the levels of Spanish attained by dual immersion graduates. This case study describes the performance on a number of measures of a graduating class at a Spanish-English dual immersion school. It analyzes their proficiency in speaking, reading and writing, their production of three grammatical forms, and their ability to identify and produce appropriately polite Spanish. Heritage Spanish speakers evidenced fairly strong Spanish systems. L2 Spanish learners scored low on several measures, but overall could communicate their ideas. Several recommendations are offered for immersion classroom pedagogy.

The present study seeks to evaluate bilinguals’ attitudes towards the contact forms that are manifested in the speech of Spanish-English bilinguals in the United States, and the factors that contribute to this linguistic assessment. Towards that end, bilinguals of diverse proficiencies are presented with five versions of the fairytale Little Red Riding Hood/La Caperucita Roja: a normative Spanish text, two Spanish texts that contrast in the type of English lexical insertions made, and two code-switched texts, differentiated by type of intra-sentential alternation represented. Multiple measures are used to evaluate participants’ attitudes, including scalar judgments on personality characteristics of the authors of the texts. Data from fifty-three participants unveil a continuum of preferences that largely confirms the hypotheses posited: Spanish-English bilinguals evaluate single-noun insertions more positively than code-switching and report more fine-grained distinctions — differentiating specific versus core noun insertions and felicitous versus infelicitous code-switching — as commensurate with social and linguistic factors, such as language heritage and linguistic competence.

The present work seeks to identify sources of the persistent link between the Spanish language and national identity in Puerto Rico. By examining mass media discourse in the 1940s as a turbulent period of language policy conflict between Puerto Rico and the U.S. federal government, I suggest that the federal imposition of language policy without the consent or approval of local politicians or educators was influential in the construction of national identity that included language as a major defining factor. Local elites reacted to the colonial hegemony by defining Puerto Rican identity in opposition to American identity. The construction of identity in the 1940s is characterized by a cultural conception of nation that redefined national symbols, such as language, in social rather than political terms in order to avoid disturbing the existing colonial hegemony.